


head in the stars (heart in your hands)

by sunshine_kitcat (moonkevin)



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Alternate Universe - College/University, Character Study, Extended Metaphors, Fluff, Gen, Light Angst, M/M, Stars, basically shotaro waxing poetics about millenial line bc who wouldnt, more like 8+1 though lmao
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-19
Updated: 2020-11-19
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:08:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27635231
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonkevin/pseuds/sunshine_kitcat
Summary: Three cups of Jaemin’s hellish coffee concoction and two week’s worth of Astrophysics homework ago, Shotaro considered himself a no-nonsense, logical and sensical guy.Of course, that didn't stay true for very long.-Alternatively, eight people who populate Shotaro's own little solar system and the observer of it all.
Relationships: Jung Sungchan/Osaki Shotaro, Minor or Background Relationship(s), noren nahyuck and chenji if u quint really hard and tilt ur head a lil
Comments: 39
Kudos: 261
Collections: WIP OLYMPICS: WINTER 2020/21





	head in the stars (heart in your hands)

**Author's Note:**

> inspired by that one pic of shotaro holding a globe because who truly does have the world in his palms

Three cups of Jaemin’s hellish coffee concoction and two week’s worth of Astrophysics homework ago, Shotaro considered himself a no-nonsense, logical and sensical guy.

Of course, this was before the slap of cold water that is Kepler’s Laws, but he digresses. Shotaro  _ likes  _ this stuff, normally. But while orbital motions and ellipses have a certain way of rotting away his brain, Shotaro finds himself slipping away from cold, hard numbers for an entirely different reason, unpredictable in any kind of logic.

Look, the story’s best told from the beginning.

  1. _The Sun: Lee Donghyuck_



At the start of the solar system, there was a whole bunch of nothing.

Well, almost-nothings, as Shotaro’s high school teacher so eloquently put it. There was nothing but cosmic dust and clouds, all flattened out in a giant disk of space goop and tiny chemical atoms. It grouped, after a couple of eons, rotating and collapsing in on itself before it formed something: the Sun.

The Sun itself had a proper name, of course, plucked out of the air with careful hands as it shook Shotaro’s own, two days before orientation. He was standing in front of his new roommate, a bright, spontaneous boy he’d come to know as Lee Donghyuck.

Some call him the incarnation of evil. Some, like Shotaro, are drawn to him like moths to light.

When the Sun formed, it exploded, in a way, pushing all of the space goop and cosmic debris to the edge of the solar system with its powerful solar winds. Shotaro had the privilege of watching it through his dingy old telescope when Donghyuck had convinced Shotaro to finally show him what all the fuss about planets was all about. The weather forecast deemed their first two weeks a hellish landscape of rain, yet the moment Donghyuck set his mind to joining Shotaro on a trip to the city outskirts, the sky became crystal clear. Almost as if it had cleared just for the boy whose enthusiasm could make the sun seem dim in contrast.

They spent two hours at the back of the subway, an earbud shared between them because Shotaro had forgotten his back at the dorms. Donghyuck called him cute when he tried to apologize, and he sent another beaming smile Shotaro’s way.

Shotaro hasn’t the slightest idea how anyone could  _ not _ be drawn to Donghyuck, really.

Donghyuck fell asleep on the train ride home after they spent two hours staring at the sky. Shotaro taught him the brightest constellations with his awkward Korean, resorting to wild hand gestures and telescope redirection instead while Donghyuck nodded along, gaping at everything. The telescope had left a tiny black smudge on the underside of Donghyuck’s right eye, leftover from the lens itself. Shotaro hadn’t the heart to point it out, too numb to how utterly beautiful it looked.

There is a phenomenon one could observe on the surface of the sun, dotted like a sprinkle of black dust over the sun’s surface. They call them ‘sun spot’s, and they resemble the collections of beauty marks and black paint that spread over Shotaro’s roommate’s cheeks. A light layer of plasma typically surrounds the sunspots illuminating it to near blinding levels and Shotaro thinks he’s already gone blind from staring at the Sun for too long.

Deep inside the folds of his own core, Shotaro wonders if this is love.

But then he looks around, and it’s all too obvious being drawn to Lee Donghyuck is nothing out of the ordinary.

  1. _Mercury: Zhong Chenle_



Despite Donghyuck’s explosion into Shotaro’s life, he’s not the first to carve himself a place in Shotaro’s model of the solar system. Chenle crash lands into Shotaro’s world—quite literally—while zooming away on his rapid elliptical period. He spills coffee all over Shotaro as a greeting and exchanges his life story in place of an apology.

Shotaro learns that Chenle’s another exchange student, much like Shotaro himself, albeit from China instead. Listening to him ramble about how terrible his Chem teacher is, however, makes Shotaro doubt the fact somehow.

But then again, Mercury’s lifespan is a mystery in and of itself.

Tidally locked with the Sun, Shotaro doesn’t know why he’s so surprised to find out Chenle and Donghyuck got along like a house on fire. Chenle’s mind moves at nine times the speed his mouth does, and even faster in comparison to his Korean. Shotaro almost feels dizzy just listening to him, but he’s swept away nonetheless.

There’s somewhat of a widespread fun fact within the Astro kids about Mercury. According to the head honchos of space, NASA, one could stand at a certain spot on Mercury and experience whiplash just watching the sun over the course of a Mercury day. It’d rise, slow near its peak and then stop, only to run backwards and set again, before rising to move across the sky once again.

In a way, talking to Chenle feels like watching a day pass on Mercury. He recounts five stories at once and explains nine backstories for each, all while flooring Shotaro’s ass in Mario Kart and trying to disrupt him. Shotaro’s always known he was on the shier side of the extroversion spectrum, doubly so with his lack of Korean fluency, but Chenle brings him to a new level of speechlessness.

A good kind of speechlessness.

As he grows accustomed to Mercury’s torpedo mind, Shotaro discovers more and more faces to map. Chenle’s inability to slow down seems to disappear as his fingers touch a piano, one fateful night he had convinced Shotaro to help him break into the school auditorium. Through the combined power of eye smiles and quiet begging, the guard had given them one hour, and Shotaro thinks even eternity wouldn’t be enough.

Chenle’s introspection leaks through with every key of the piano, forming saltwater rivers along his surface as Shotaro watches in a conflicted state of awe and concern. He settled on something in the middle, deciding to act on their minuscule one year age gap to reach over and wrap him in a light hug.

The tears go unexplained and unmentioned for the next five times it happens, until one day Chenle forgoes the piano all together to just cry on Shotaro’s bed for the night.

As Shotaro would learn, all travellers come to miss home at one point or another, no matter how fast they’re moving forward.

The craters on Mercury are named after artists, an homage to Mercury the gods’ patronage over anything and everything under the sun. The lullabies Chenle sings for himself while curled up on Shotaro’s bed at four AM in the morning are named after his favourite foods, an homage to home. The gentle smiles of encouragement Shotaro send to Chenle are named after memories, an homage to the wild journey that is friendship with Chenle.

Shotaro wouldn’t have it any other way.

  1. _Venus: Na Jaemin_



Jaemin worms his way into Shotaro’s life much like how calculus etches itself onto a young, aspiring astrophysicist’s unsuspecting mind. That is, to say, by being a complete and utter mind fuck.

Shotaro wants to compare him to Venus, but even the sheer weirdness of the planet would pale in comparison to Na Jaemin himself.

At first, Shotaro admires Jaemin from afar. Campus sweetheart, handsome and smart Environmental Studies major, heart-of-gold volunteer at the local food bank, the list goes on. He’s beautiful and amazing, ridiculously put together and near-perfect from Shotaro’s little corner of observation.

The thing is, as Shotaro learns over and over again with each practical lab he does, nothing in the world is perfect, although Jaemin came damn close to it.

Below the hospitable and pleasant clouds of life-creating nitrogen and warm air is a turbulent storm that tosses logic around like it’s a beach ball on the children’s court. Shotaro’s first proper meeting with Jaemin was via Donghyuck because he’s simply the center of everything. He finds Jaemin passed out on the floor, a litter of tissues all around him as a giant carton of ice cream lies sadly next to him. Donghyuck is sitting over Jaemin, a laptop on his knees as he furiously taps away, and Shotaro can only awkwardly stare at the whole ordeal.

He later finds out that Na Jaemin, the perfect model human, had just gotten dumped by his perfect girlfriend over text at ass o’clock in the morning. Shotaro vaguely recalls seeing them argue on the front steps of the library, before he had deemed his homework slightly more important than campus gossip. Turns out, the gossip came to him instead, manifesting in Jaemin’s half-hearted attempt to explain why he was on the floor in the first place. Donghyuck claimed talking about it helps let all of the angst out, and Shotaro was just too nice to try and argue otherwise.

Staring at Jaemin and Donghyuck, Shotaro started to guess the real reason for the breakup anyway.

They say the reason Venus is so weird and inhospitable is because of a runaway greenhouse effect. As the Sun got older and hotter, it heated the surface of Venus and caused the water on it to vaporize, becoming water vapour in the air. That in turn made the planet even hotter, until the carbon deposits and methane traces filled the air and heated the planet even further, until it was so hot everything went awry. The sky rained acid and metal snow, the planet’s orbit tipped upside down and rotated the wrong way, the world becoming a complete and utter mess in every way.

Some could call the Sun the trigger for it all.

Shotaro likes to think it was all inevitable, and the Sun started it to let Venus start healing before the scars got worse.

Shotaro finds Jaemin standing awkwardly in front of the dorm room one night, a bouquet in one hand and the other held up to the door in a hesitant knock. Shotaro had taken pity on the poor guy to explain that Donghyuck is going to kill him if he shows up looking all perfect while Donghyuck had just rolled out of his afternoon nap. Jaemin understood right away, spurring some hidden demon inside as he barged in anyway. It had been funny in the moment, but Jaemin ultimately got smacked for it in the end.

A mindfuck, Shotaro decides. Na Jaemin, even more so than the absolute enigma that is Venus, is an absolute and complete brain meltdown.

But Shotaro isn’t going to let  _ that _ stop him from mapping out the rest of the solar system.

  1. _Mars: Huang Renjun_



As the messenger of the gods and light speed traveller of Shotaro’s solar system, it comes as no surprise that Chenle discovers the next planet in their model of the world. Their friend group is growing now, slowly but constantly as Chenle drags over his new friend from China, only this one just permanently transferred over. Shotaro is introduced to Huang Renjun through the same way he’s introduced to Chenle—a cup of coffee dripping wet down the front of his shirt. Chenle cackles at them the whole time Renjun rushes to help clean Shotaro up but eventually moves to help them anyway.

In a lot of ways, Renjun resembles Mars.

He’s prickly and rough on the outside, like the southern hemisphere of the red planet, complete with a thin atmosphere and non-existent tolerance for bullshit. Shotaro finds this out the first time Chenle’s teasing exceeds some unknown capacity and Renjun has him in a headlock. He’s capable of simultaneously gravitating towards the Sun and fighting it, a burning passion lit deep inside of him.

But at the same time, much like the smooth canvas of Mars’s northern hemisphere, Renjun is gentle and subtle with his affection, manifesting in the bag of chips thrown haphazardly in front of Shotaro when he’s fallen asleep in the middle of their studying session, or the bag of okay takeout he spent three hours looking for when Shotaro comes down with a particularly vicious cough. Shotaro had nearly cried eating that one, takeout food somehow resembling his mother’s concoction and tasting nothing like it at the same time. Renjun didn’t prod, only patted him on the shoulder and said it’s okay to stop smiling all the time for once.

The largest volcano in the solar system is called Olympus Mons, one of the four lava punches from underneath Mars’s crust as it tries to bubble out. Shotaro is the sole witness of the first full-blown explosion when he watches a jarring mix of rocky highland and peaceful flatland manifesting in the form of Renjun’s tightly clenched fist. He punches Jaemin’s ex’s new boyfriend in the face for daring to show up at his door and give him hell for no reason at all. Venus’s clouds are thick, covering anything and everything in sight, but Shotaro’s had plenty of experience guessing what’s happening underneath. A small comment here and there is enough to send the boiling magma under Mars’s crust above ground, punching a hole in the otherwise dull landscape.

In typical Renjun fashion, his Mars carves out a valley for the massive eruption too. Valles Marineris is a deep depression on Mars’s surface, carved out by ancient tectonic plates drifting apart. A perfectly fitted indent is left behind, big enough to fit all of the people Renjun cares about. It’s mesmerizing, to watch Renjun slowly carve out a piece of his life for the people around him. He’s willing to give up and offer so much, yet demands so little in return.

Shotaro dutifully notes it all down in the solar system model forming in his mind, jotting down a single quick-phrase next to Mars.

‘Handle with all the care and love possible in these worlds.’

  1. _Jupiter: Lee Jeno_



Shotaro’s starting to jump too far ahead now.

Three cosmic steps and a giant planet earlier, Shotaro is first introduced to Lee Jeno of the Student Association through what he thinks would make for his top ten worst first meetings: shaving his sideburns off after a piece of gum got stuck to the side.

Jeno lives in the room adjacent to Shotaro and Donghyuck, resulting in them sharing a bathroom. Shotaro had come back home from a long day of classes and brain-frying to find a pretty boy standing in front of the mirror, razor in hand, a giant blob of red gum on his head. In his mind, Shotaro lovingly refers to it as Jeno’s Bug Red Spot.

Jupiter is known for being big and complicated, housing small worlds of its own in the giant moons that orbit around it. Shotaro finds himself staring at the bands of zones and belts that make up the stripes around Jupiter’s gassy face, mind tracing back to the streaks of personality he finds leaking through Jeno’s customer service smile.

He learns that in-between the light cream layers of politeness and Student Association Poster Boy ate deep ochre and orange smears of a hardworking, determined soul. Shotaro would come to learn each of the smears rather closely, especially in their one night adventure of being locked in the planetarium without their phones (left outside for maximum enjoyment) or friends to come help (everyone had gone home for the short break).

Shotaro catalogues each phase of the night by a different Galilean moon, aka the four major moons of Jupiter. Ganymede is by far the largest and decidedly most influential. Its pull is magnetic, enticing Shotaro and daring him to come closer before consuming him and his curiosity in one fell swoop. Shotaro learns nothing but trivia for the first hour, bouncing a harmless game of twenty questions between him and Jeno while they stare at Andromeda in the planetarium sky. It serves as a gateway, an entry point of sorts, to the world of Lee Jeno.

The second moon Shotaro learns of is Callisto, far out in the far reaches of Jupiter’s gravity and independent in comparison to the other moons. Its pull is decidedly less powerful than Ganymede, but Shotaro finds himself sucked in nonetheless. There’s a theory that Jupiter and its moons generate such a powerful field of influence it catches the asteroids raining from beyond the inner solar system, preventing the more powerful ones from colliding with the inner solar system. A theory, Shotaro thinks, that is quite possibly the loneliest idea ever. A single protector to defend against the whole world, out and about on its own for eons and eons, preventing its inner solar system from getting hurt.

And yet, it so perfectly describes Jeno.

The third moon comes abruptly, just like its sulfuric volcanoes. Like a bloom of radiation from Io, Jeno unravels at ass o’clock when they’ve run out of mapped stars to talk about. Shotaro watches in mild concern as Jeno dissolves, becoming nothing but a sprinkle of tears across his glassy eyes. He tells Shotaro his life story in gratitude for the night of distraction, explaining his high contrast and overprotectiveness.

See, Lee Jeno is a ticking time bomb.

A deadline looms over him, ticking down every last second of his frail life as the persistent hurricane inside rots him away slowly. He made Shotaro swear not to tell the others, and Shotaro learns his place in all of this. He’s the observer, the note taker, the listener.

He’s never the solution finder.

Europa is the last of the four major Jupiter moons and the only one with liquid water in abundance under its surface. A big, beautiful haven of potential life, locked away underneath a withered, decayed skeleton of death. Shotaro knows he can find life somehow, let it bleed through and colour the moon with vivid colour. Jeno has accepted his fate, resorting to faded creams and dying shades of yellow ochre.

So, Shotaro introduces him to Mars, in hopes of sharing the spark of fire over to a dim world.

And to say it worked would be an understatement.

  1. _Saturn: Liu Yangyang_



If one asked an astronomer what made them want to look at celestial bodies for a living, eight out of ten people would say they saw Saturn through a telescope at some point.

If one asked Shotaro what made him decide an absolute stranger was his Saturn, he’d have to tell an embarrassing story about his ideal Saturn, and how it came to life.

In short, Saturn is irregular.

But then again, no planet is ‘regular’, and perhaps that’s what made the stranger his perfect Saturn.

Shotaro meets Liu Yangyang in a dance class, when old passions resurface and he can’t help but sign up for a club he knows he won’t have time for. It seems the only other person stupid enough to do the same is the Nanotechnology major and German exchange student Liu Yangyang, who greets Shotaro with a bright smile and excited rambling of ‘finally someone my age! Ten can’t baby me anymore’.

Shotaro was practically smitten at first glance.

In his mind, the ideal Saturn is the most beautiful thing in existence. The planet itself is a masterful palette of beiges and deep velvet, swirling in its two polar storm systems. Staring at Saturn from afar is enough to make anyone lose their words, but nothing compares to seeing the photos of it up close. The storms resemble broken rifts of sorts, like a portal to another world.

Yangyang is objectively one of the prettiest people Shotaro has ever met, up there with the League of Stupidly Handsome Boys Sent Shotaro’s Way to Reaffirm How Utterly Gay He Is, along with Na Jaemin and Lee Jeno. He’s bright and hyper among the crowd of quiet, introverted spirits that populate their dance team. Yet instead of sticking out and drawing others to him like Donghyuck, Yangyang is bright like the symphony that blends everyone's harmonies. He leads Shotaro by hand through the motions of what Yangyang calls Faking Extraversion 101, spinning Shotaro along the orbit around him until Shotaro feels like nothing more than one of the moons around Saturn, locked in eternal orbit as he’s drawn closer and closer to Yangyang with each passing day.

Saturn’s beauty is in large thanks to its magnificent rings, a wonder in and of itself. It manifests in the aura around Yangyang in his every move, layers of comfort, excitement, anger, vibrance, emotions, emotions and so many emotions. Shotaro thinks he could spend a lifetime exploring the rings and never get bored, always in a mild state of awe around his new friend. Donghyuck teases him endlessly for it, extending his grasp to pull Yangyang into their growing circle of planets, all circulating each other like an overcomplicated system of ellipses and phases that would make even an astronomer cry trying to understand it all.

But the amazing thing is: it works. They don’t collide and veer off course, don’t step on each others’ toes or threaten to destroy everything in their precarious system of balance. Amidst it all, Shotaro finds himself staring at the others in wonder, his fascination for the solar system manifesting in a different form in front of his very eyes.

And really, Shotaro gets why eight out of ten astronomers got their dream after staring at Saturn.

  1. _Uranus: Park Jisung_



A year passes without much fanfare, consisting of numbers and photos of the sky as Shotaro trudges through his degree like a bumbling idiot. When it comes time to return to Japan, Shotaro reaches a strange stalemate, of sorts. His program allowed for two days after exams to spend with friends before the summer whisked him back to familiarity. Jaemin proposes a trip to his hometown of Jeonju, his mother demanding they all come over for dinner anyway. So the full group squeezed into their tiny spaceship, and Shotaro ends up discovering more of his newfound solar system than previously anticipated.

So far, all around him, Shotaro has discovered what astronomers call the visible planets, all spinning around in their respective orbits for Shotaro to stare at all day and night. And yet, prickling under Shotaro’s carefully concealed night sky, is a further out planet, barely on the edge of visibility. Shotaro has seen the planet before, of course, through a layer of grainy film over Jaemin’s phone.

Park Jisung is Jaemin’s stepbrother and soon-to-be student at SMU, although his first year is one too late for Shotaro to still be around. Still, sitting in Jaemin’s living room and watching Jisung bicker with Chenle and trail behind Jeno like a lost puppy is proof enough for him of Jisung’s place in their solar system.

Uranus is a curious planet, although one of Shotaro’s favourite traits is its inner composition. The immense amount of pressure presses on the carbon molecules inside of the planet’s composition to such immense degrees they become diamonds. The entire planet, just a giant ocean of liquid diamond with more solid diamonds (diamondbergs?) floating around on top of it.

Likewise, Shotaro discovers diamonds in Jisung’s disposition, from his passion and drive rivalling that of Uranus’s pressure to his adorable smile that glimmers like diamonds under a spotlight. Shotaro feels a pang of disappointment when it comes time to leave, suddenly engrossed in the need to watch this baby chick grow into the million-carat jewel he’ll someday become. Realistically, Shotaro knows he won’t miss much. He’s already decided on taking his masters in Korea afterwards, so it’s really only one year left in Japan before he can return to his solar system. Still, one year can be a lifetime, depending on which planet you’re on. It’s a fundamental fact of orbital mechanics, after all.

Three seconds before Shotaro could finish lugging his suitcase out to Jaemin’s mom’s car to head to the airport, Jisung comes tumbling out of the house, something in hand. It turns out to be a decorated notebook the others had spent ages mulling over at the store without Shotaro knowing. A souvenir, Jisung claimed. One of the others almost forgot to give him, after last night’s gaming catastrophe.

Elliptic in nature, Uranus’s orbit makes its distance from the rest of the solar system objects vary the most. At times, it’s ridiculously close to the other planets, like the two wonderful days Shotaro spends with Park Jisung’s adorable everything. At other times, it’s in the far reaches of the solar system’s nether regions, and Shotaro doesn’t so much as catch a glimpse of him all year.

Still, that won’t stop Shotaro from developing an attachment to Jisung. After all, he’s still in Shotaro’s model of the solar system.

And so, with his notebook in hand and the promise of returning ‘before you even know it!’, Shotaro takes one last look at the solar system that he had spent the past year observing, and boards his vessel home. The notebook feels heavy in his hands, silently packed with a years’ worth of observations, notes and analysis, unfortunately, put on pause for the time being.

He’ll be back, Shotaro vows, and he’ll spend the rest of his life with his solar system.

  1. _Neptune: Jung Sungchan_



There’s a funny story about the importance of timing in the world of astronomy. Sometime in the mid-1800s, two astronomers had discovered something curious in the sky: a planet beyond Uranus, a similar colour yet not quite the same. Two astrophysicists, one French and one English, had discovered its existence and calculated its next predicted position, sending in letters to a large observatory capable of finding and documenting the planet officially. They were so close, in fact, that the English astronomer lost his credit on the planet’s discovery because his prediction was a mere two days too late. Poor guy. All because the mail came late.

Similarly, Shotaro receives seven different text messages about the same event mere minutes between each other. Chenle, ever the speedy planet that he is, was the first message to pop up in front of Shotaro’s face as he stares at his phone in the asscrack of dawn, three cups of Jaemin’s coffee order humming in his blood and two weeks’ worth of astrophysics homework finally completed in front of him. As if it was on some kind of cosmic timer, Shotaro’s phone dings the moment the assignment went through the submission portal, lighting up with a message.

Neptune is the first planet discovered through the power of math, and Sungchan is the first planet Shotaro finds intentionally. Armed with a total of five tidbits of information from his friends, Shotaro spends his weekend searching for a mysterious Korean exchange student the others swear Shotaro would probably fall heads over heels for. Given, of course, that Shotaro can even find the dude. According to the others, Sungchan is a tall Korean chemical physics major, younger than Shotaro by a year and resembles a giant puppy.

As Shotaro predicts, none of the clues were helpful in the slightest.

Shotaro discovers his Neptune through its properties. Neptune resembles a giant hurricane, on the best of days, with average wind speeds peeking well above the speed of sound on Earth. With wind speeds that high, it’s no wonder its clouds get whipped and stretched to resemble a series of cotton balls ravaged by an unhinged kitten.

Sungchan is just as much of a hurricane, barreling into Shotaro’s life before he even has a chance to complain about how terrible his friends are at giving identification traits. He, quite literally, crashes into Shotaro on his way through the doorway out of the Physics building. Unlike Chenle (thankfully) no coffee was spilled, although Shotaro does drop absolutely everything and ends up clutching his head in pain. For a supposed giant puppy made of squishy hugs (Donghyuck’s and Jaemin’s words, not his), running into Sungchan feels like crashing into an asteroid.

The upside, at least, is that Shotaro’s friends predicted him perfectly. He did, in fact, fall head and heels for one Jung Sungchan, literally.

(And maybe metaphorically too.)

What started as a temporary dampener on the faulty valve over Shotaro’s yearning to return to his friends soon filled up more pages in Shotaro’s mental notebook of his newfound solar system than all of the others combined. He’s not biased in the slightest, no. It’s just that Sungchan is around more often than the others, that’s all.

At least, that’s what Shotaro tells himself.

_ +1. Earth: Osaki Shotaro _

With a suitcase in hand and a tired yawn bubbling in his throat, the observer of the solar system steps off of the plane. There are tired eye bags under his eyes from the last of his finals earlier in the day and an excited hum under his skin from landing in his solar system again. By his side is Neptune, in all of his gentle glory as he leads Earth by hand through Incheon airport, stepping past the sliding glass doors.

Mercury, always the fastest of the planets, is the first to seize hold of him, followed promptly by Mercury’s soulmate Uranus. The diamond had grown into his final form, a cute but giant second year that easily towers over Shotaro.

The others fall in line afterwards, murmurs of ‘welcome back’ and ‘did you bring me food’ blending into the background like ambient noise as Earth watches the rest of the solar system slot into place. The sun, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, all ready to greet Earth’s return home.

Home.

And at the end of the day, that’s what the planets are to Shotaro. A home that extends past the physical restraints of his life, open to the imagination and free for him to dream in. Dream  _ with _ .

“Head in the stars again?” Sungchan teases him when they’re squished in the back of the subway, nothing but two layers of t-shirts between them while two more boys squish on their other side. Shotaro turns to Sungchan, a small smile on his lips.

“When is it not?” Shotaro counters and Sungchan grins back at him in response. One cultural exchange and eight other worlds ago, Shotaro considered himself a no-nonsense, logical and sensical guy.

Now, Shotaro’s nothing more than the dreamer behind the telescope.

**Author's Note:**

> follow me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/heonynchans)


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